Field Trip: Cotopaxi, Narrative Version

June 2013

“No,” Pete said to our guide. “I’ve known this man for eighteen years.  He’s a tough fucker.  It’s not fitness; it’s the altitude.”  

I was on my knees, leaning on my ice-ax.  Sleet, wind, and freezing rain pounded down on us. I could make out the shadows of the two men in my headlamp.  It must have been about 4 AM or so, the light just coming on, but I couldn’t summon the energy to pull off my gloves to look at my watch for hours.

We were 300m from the top, Segundo said.  Segundo was our guide, and one tough fucker himself.  On the list of bad-asses I’ve met in life, and I’ve met quite a few, Segundo makes the top five.  I know I’m mixing my meters and feet; Segundo spoke in meters, but I still have to conceptualize elevation in feet (and temperature in Fahrenheit for that matter).  What I now know is is that we were standing (or kneeling in my case) on a glacier, on the side of Ecuador’s second highest peak, Cotopaxi, at over 18,000 feet.  Since I don’t really have any mountaineering ambitions, it is likely the highest I will ever go.  

I also now know that I was experiencing altitude sickness, or Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), and possibly even hypoxia.  Whatever it’s called my body was not cooperating with my brain.  While from the outside the symptoms look like intoxication -- and actually felt like it in my body -- my brain was hyper-aware.  I remember the dialogue between Segundo and Pete and the decision to turn back perfectly, though I was babbling incoherently at the time.  Pete and I laughed later about the “eighteen years” because it was so random and specific at the same time -- and short a couple years.  

My most vivid memory on the glacier was setting tiny goals: ten steps, just ten steps, then rest.  Then I’d count out five or six before I’d drop to my knees again on my ice-axe.  I have tested myself in all kinds of endurance events, and this one blew them all away.  I think I’d rather run another marathon than take ten steps at 18,000’ again.

I might have even enjoyed the sensation, had it not been for Thor’s Hammer knocking incessantly on the inside of my skull, a feeling I think was probably my pulse.  This was my biggest crime (and I should have known better): dehydration.  I simply could not get enough water into my system.  I should have had Advil and coca leaves -- the latter of which is renowned among climbers and indigenous people of the Andes for its ability to counteract the symptoms of AMS.  By the time we reached the high camp where I’d attempt to sleep, my head was pounding 100 times worse than the worst hangover I’d ever experienced (and, well, I’ve had a couple of spectacular brain-busters in my day).

I do remember well the combined feeling of relief and disappointment.  The weather was nasty, as it can be at 18,000’.  Later, when we stepped off the glacier, we’d be coated in a layer of ice so that, if you bent your arm, all these little pieces of ice would shatter off. There was little to no chance we’d have a clear summit on Cotopaxi’s famous cone summit.  

Cotopaxi is the iconic symbol of the glaciated Andean volcano: it rises to 19,347' a mind-bogglingly massive and perfectly symmetrical cone.  Cotopaxi’s sprawling flanks and surrounding páramo form the Cotopaxi National Refuge, and that covers more than 33 thousand hectares -- or upwards of 90,000 acres!

High elevation climbing is all about acclimatization.  Ideally, you spend a couple of days hiking between the refugios -- or base camps -- and the high camps.  Cotopaxi is usually attempted from the north side, but my friend Pete had connections with the owner of the less popular Cara Sur Refugio, Don Eduardo, whose land abuts the National Park.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time for hiking around.  Don Eduardo, driving his LP gas modified Land Cruiser, had picked us up in Quito in the early morning, stopped once for groceries, and driven us up to the Refugio.  There we’d eaten a great lunch, gotten outfitted with our climbing gear, and were hiking the páramo up to the moonscape of high camp by the same afternoon.  

Before we left the high camp at around midnight or 1AM, Segundo had asked if we had any extra batteries.  Neither Pete nor I had any extras… just one little headlamp apiece.  Oh well, he’d said, like it was nothing.  Segundo had something like 35 summits under his belt on the south face; he knew it like his own backyard.  Well, it was his own back yard.  So he’d led us, all roped together, winding through crevasses 100s of feet deep in some cases, literally in the dark.  

And that’s the reason for the midnight start for the summit: the ice is more stable.  When the day warms, the ice becomes more dangerous.  The typical game plan then is to summit around day-break, take a couple pictures, high-fives all around, and descend before the warm-up.

As we descended, I noticed the mine-field we’d navigated.  “Holy shit,” I said aloud to myself several times.  There was one thin spot, especially, where Segundo had us anchor him with ropes and ice-axes as he crossed a narrow ice bridge.  They put me in the middle, by the way, because  was the heaviest by far, and if I went down a crevasse -- the thinking goes -- there’s an anchor on either side of me.  If I were first or last and went down, conversely, there was the fear that I’d drag my two fellow mountaineers down with me.  

Just two weeks earlier, I’d been training by surfing and running on the beach in Canoa.  After nine months living and cycling and hiking from 8,400’ and higher, we’d moved to the coast, to sea-level -- and thus, I’d forfeit all of the elevation conditioning I’d had in the previous months!  In terms of elevation acclimatization, it only takes a week to lose what it takes months to gain.

This would prove to be a big part of my elevation problem, or at least that’s my theory.  It’s said that some people, regardless of fitness, just can’t do high elevations.  It’s possible that I’m in that boat as well.  By the time we got back to Otavalo, I’d only have two weeks to re-acclimatize and do a few high elevation hikes -- none of which was in excess of 15’000’ which was lower than the Refugio!  

A big part of the timing for our hike was the fact that June is one of, if not the best times of the year to attempt the summit.  The weather is comparatively peaceful, and the ice is the most stable.  While we were down on the beach, however, just a few weeks before our anticipated climb, a Canadian woman was killed by a massive falling chunk of ice while climbing the north face.  She was in her early 20s and fit, proving that the mountain doesn’t care who you are -- a reminder of the consequences.

By the time I was back in Otavalo, we had lived in Ecuador for ten months, and despite having to start all over elevation-wise, I was feeling pretty comfortable getting around.  Fuya Fuya was my Camel’s Hump, my main go-to hike, and it was becoming familiar.  After looking at it for so long and living just under it -- and even circumnavigating it -- I’d finally hiked Imbabura with Pete at just over 15,000’.  Still, I wonder how I would have done without a month at sea-level.

Pete shook me awake, and the hammers started in my head again.  

“We have to get down.  Now.  The longer you stay up here, the worse it gets.”  He was right.  I’d lost two night of sleep, one due to trip anxiety and 0-dark-thirty travel, and one at the high camp where we were to “nap” from dusk to midnight.  The combination of cold (I had a short, badly insulated sleeping bag) and wind whipping the tarps of the camp, as well as chronic dehydration, I didn’t sleep a wink.  I’d just drifted off for the first time in 48 hours and the delicious sensation was seductive.  

I crankily roused myself, stuffed my feet into cold-hard mountaineering boots, slid on my outer layers, gathered my gear, and followed Pete down the volcanic moonscape trail back towards the páramo and the Refugio.  With each step we descended, I felt the pressure on my temples let up, and when we got back to Eduardo’s place, I happily gobbled Ibuprofin like skittles and drank a couple pints of water.  On the walk down, I began to re-occupy my own head.  Squat purple and yellow wildflowers dotted the trail, and couple of rainbows even bloomed over the quebradas below us.  What an unearthly and utterly beautiful place.

By the time the owner was driving us back down toward Quito, I was back to normal and grateful, first for being alive and second for the chance to walk on a glacier.  

Cotopaxi and its sister volcanoes Illiniza and Antisana supply Quito’s 1.6 million people with potable water.  But the glaciers are melting.  Quickly.  Pete’s lived in Ecuador for 10 years, and he’s seen the white line receding up the mountain.  Some scientists give the dozen or so glaciated Andean volcanoes another 10 years before the ice runs out completely.

Not the happiest note to end on, of course.  It’s a sad state, and one that Americans are responsible for at least as much as Ecuadorians, whose carbon footprints are generally a lot smaller.  Yet it’s Ecuador and the people of the capital who will have to struggle with some sort of replacement long-term -- and neither gringos nor South Americans, at least in my personal experience, are good at planning for the long term.  Maybe if Ecuador figures it out, they can give California some pointers.